Page:Lieutenant and Others (1915) by Sapper.djvu/45

 frame the words. When they came it was only a whisper, but had he shouted through a megaphone none would have heard. The din was too incredible.

And still they came. His eyes were fixed stupidly on a man kneeling down behind a traverse, who was muttering foolishly to himself. He saw his lips moving, he cursed him foolishly, childishly, when, with a roar that seemed to split his whole head open, a high-explosive shell burst on the traverse itself. The man who had been muttering fell forward, was hurled forward, and his head stuck out of the earth which had fallen on him. Gerald laughed. It was deuced funny; he started to howl with mirth, when suddenly the head rolled towards him. But he could not stop laughing.

At last he pulled himself together. So this was what he had read about so often in the papers at home, was it?—“a furious bombardment of our trenches.” Perhaps, though, he reflected, this was not a furious bombardment; perhaps this was only “a slight artillery activity upon our front.” And then 3